Qi's Prismatic Grange
| Qi's Prismatic Grange | |
|---|---|
| Type | Special Order |
| Board | Mr. Qi |
| Giver | Mr. Qi |
| Time Limit | 14 days |
| Repeatable | Yes |
Mr. Qi wants a rainbow sorted into his collection box: a hundred red things, a hundred orange, a hundred yellow, a hundred green, a hundred blue and a hundred purple. Six hundred items sounds brutal until the one kind rule is read, which is that nothing has to be gathered while the order is live. A chest filled slowly over a year empties into the box in a single afternoon, which makes this the only notice on his board that can be finished before it is even accepted. Thirty-five Qi Gems is the payment, and the honest cost is whatever the six hundred items would have been worth elsewhere, because none of them come back. A farm that hoards is rewarded here, and a farm that sells everything has to buy its way through.
The board reads: Find 100 each of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple items. Place them in my collection box.
Requirements
Colour is decided by the game's dye lists rather than by how an item looks, and the box is fussier than the dye pots are, so it accepts a narrower set. The quickest check is the inventory icon: anything eligible is marked with a little dot of its colour, and the pots at Emily and Haley's house in town list what each of the six will take.
Processed goods inherit the colour of whatever went into them, which is where a cellar earns its keep. A jelly, a juice, a jar of pickles, a bottle of wine, a Dried Fruit or mushroom, a Smoked Fish and roe of either kind all read as whatever went into them, so a year of preserves jars quietly sorts itself into several of the six columns.
Different items can share a colour, so a hundred of a colour can be made up from many different things. The box also refuses to hold more than a hundred of a colour at a time, which stops an overfilled chest from being tipped in wholesale.
Deposited items are gone for good once the order is settled. That is worth knowing before a stack of iridium goes in.
The collection box takes six colours, a hundred items of each.
| Colour | Amount |
|---|---|
| Red | 100 |
| Orange | 100 |
| Yellow | 100 |
| Green | 100 |
| Blue | 100 |
| Purple | 100 |
Rewards
Thirty-five gems is a middling payment that covers a Key To The Town with change towards a Hopper, or the recipe for Hyper Speed-Gro with a Mushroom Tree Seed on top, or seven packets of Magic Bait for a farm that fishes more than it mines.
Set against that is the pile handed over, and the pile is where the thinking belongs. A hundred pieces of Iridium Ore would make a great many sprinklers. A hundred bales of Hay would feed a barn through winter. Spending the cheap end of each colour and keeping the useful end is the whole art of this order.
Strategy
Purple sets the pace, so it should be solved first. Krobus sells Void Essence in the sewers, but only ten a day, which means a straight purchase of a hundred takes ten separate visits and eats most of the fortnight on its own. Bug meat from the mines is the free alternative and arrives in heaps from any infested floor, Grapes grown in garden pots regrow every few days, and Refined Quartz or Iridium Ore will do it for a farm with a furnace running.
The other five are far gentler. Sap drops from every tree felled anywhere and fills yellow for nothing, which is better than spending Hay the animals need. Fiber comes from clearing weeds and from Fiber Seeds, and fills green. Blackberries in the hedges fill blue, and so does Joja Cola from the vending machine for anyone who would rather pay than forage. Copper ore is the standard answer for orange, and a few bombs on the upper mine floors produce it faster than the blacksmith sells it. Red is the awkward one to forage, with Salmonberries in spring and Cranberries in fall the easiest hundred, and a jelly made from cheap fruit counting as red as well.
Buying the lot outright is a real option for a rich farm. Spaghetti and Salad are both on the saloon menu every day, Hay sits in Marnie's bins, cola comes out of the machine and Copper Ore is on Clint's counter, which covers five of the six colours for a sum a good year of wine makes back easily. Only purple resists, because of the ten a day limit.
The purple column is where the order fails. A farmer who leaves Krobus until the second week discovers the maths too late, and a farmer who tries to substitute Iridium Ore at that point finds out how much a hundred pieces of it is worth.
Notes
Even rubbish has a column. A Rotten Plant pulled out of a bin counts as orange, which is a kinder end for it than the compost.
An order that is abandoned halfway does give the goods back. Whatever went into the box turns up in the lost and found at the mayor's house, so a fortnight of collecting is recoverable even when the notice itself is not.
Its fortnight is counted from the Monday it went up on the board, not from the moment it entered the journal, and here that barely matters. The order's work can all be done in advance, and the only thing the clock really governs is how many visits to Krobus will fit.
All Special Orders
Every special order from both boards, with who posts it and how long it runs.